Wrong ways to the truth

Our opinion: Allowing wrongfully convicted people to sue for their imprisonment, even if they confessed, is a good first step, but preventing such injustices would be an even better approach.

Justice is no better served when an innocent person goes to prison than when a guilty person goes free. It’s all the more troubling when these injustices stem from bad confessions.

Even when people confess, it doesn’t always mean they’re guilty. And even when they are, the confession isn’t always valid.

Recall, for example, the outrageous, wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five, the teenagers convicted in the brutal 1989 attack of a jogger in New York City. DNA tests and the real attacker’s admissions later proved their innocence, but the teens, under pressure by police, signed confessions. They were convicted and imprisoned for between six and 13 years.

People make false admissions of guilt for varied reasons. Sometimes they implicate themselves under duress during intense police interrogation. Some suspects are simply unable to distinguish truth from fiction, perhaps due to drug use or mental instability.

According to the Innocence Project, nearly 25 percent of cases in which DNA tests have exonerated people convicted of crimes, the defendants had made incriminating statements, given outright confessions, or pled guilty. The project, a nonprofit organization affiliated with Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, promotes DNA testing to help those who are wrongfully convicted.

Improper interrogations are often blamed in cases where the innocent implicate themselves. While it’s legal for police to use false information in interrogations in efforts to trip up suspects who may be lying, there are limits. Police can’t, for example, make a person falsely believe a loved one’s life is in danger.

That’s what New York’s highest court said happened to Adrian Thomas, a Troy man convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder for causing the death of his infant son. The court said detectives used “highly coercive deceptions” to interrogate him, which “completely undermined” his right to remain silent and caused “substantial risk of false incrimination.” Sixty-seven times, during more than nine hours of interrogation, the police told Adrian Thomas, falsely, they considered the severe head injuries to his son, Matthew, to be accidental. If he explained to them what happened, he was told, he would not be arrested and could go home.

In throwing out the conviction, the Court of Appeals said other compelling and admissible evidence supported a conviction. That evidence now will be presented in a new trial.

There’s a further injustice for those who are genuinely innocent and wrongfully convicted: If they confess, even wrongly, they are blocked by current law from seeking compensation.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has a remedy. His Unjust Imprisonment Act would allow all wrongfully convicted people the automatic right to seek compensation.

That’s a fair and just idea. People whose confessions were made out of fear, who had a serious psychological problem, or who were simply too young to know what they were doing should be allowed to seek compensation for their wrongful imprisonment.

We urge the attorney general and lawmakers to also press for a serious examination of police interrogation techniques, and better training in how to question people properly. That would go a long way toward reducing both problems, which, ultimately, are an injustice to society. Whether the wrong person is convicted or a guilty person goes free, there’s usually a bad guy who isn’t behind bars.

How about we hold those that wrongly convicted the innocent pay for it. The cops, the prosecutors and the judges. Or maybe we figure out what the falsely imprisoned would or could have made annually, add in a penalty against the prosecutors offices budget and just cut them a check, that way we cut out the bloodsucking attorney middle men. There are far to many innocent people in our prisons due to the ego centric law enforcement community and they need to be held financially accountable!

I think sometimes people forget where we actually are in the criminal justice system in America. We would like to believe it operates one way when it is much more complicated and human than that. But there is good news in the people who do the often hidden work of trying to make a more just world. So I do want to give a shout out for all the people working in groups such as the Innocence Project.

The editorial makes an important and timely point about trying to prevent wrongful convictions, but then pivots into a terribly misinformed statement about the Adrian Thomas case. The judges of the Court of Appeals did not say “other compelling and admissible evidence supported a conviction.” On the contrary: they stated that it was quite sensible that connections between Thomas’s coerced statements, and the testimony of doctors, could be “readily understood as a congruence forged by the interrogation.” It appears the editorial writer mistook the decision’s second page survey of the trial evidence for an endorsement of the jury’s conclusion – a mistake Times Union writer Robert Gavin also made in his earlier analysis of the decision. As a member of the community that is re-living (and re-subsidizing) the mess of the botched Thomas investigation, it pains me to see our region’s most prominent newspaper stumble over the simple aspects of the Court of Appeal’s plain skepticism about the integrity of the Thomas prosecution. Times Union writers shouldn’t feed unfounded conclusions about the case to readers, and should instead demonstrate a healthy respect for the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” Enough is enough.

I urge people to read the decision for themselves on the Court of Appeals website. The Court decision said nothing about there still being compelling evidence to support a conviction. What the Court said is being taken out of context and a large part of what the Court said on this particular issue is being completely omitted. The Court was simply responding to one of the points on appeal – legal sufficiency. (Page 2 of the decision in response to Point 2 of the appeal, I believe) The court stated that the evidence presented at the time of trial “sufficed” to support the conviction. The Court went on to say that the jury should not have been presented certain evidence, specifially the confession, because it was coerced and quite possibly false. The Court adds that the police provided him with every detail in order to fit their ever changing theory of the “crime.” Frankly there is compelling evidence that a crime was never even committed. There is no other evidence and one of their own prosecutors admitted as much at the first appeal on the record.

1. Tape all interrogations; 2. Make all plea bargain offers on tape available to the jury (so they can see that the DA asking them for 30 years was willing to settle for 6 months); 3. Have all DAs and judges make public the estimated price to taxpayers of their charge/sentence, so people know.

Some people may not have a heart and feel OK with sending an apple-thief to jail for thirty years, but even these people have a wallet, and may think this over once they realize the financial cost of our current mania for incarceration.